Touch screen displays provide a highly adaptable means for providing user interfaces through which users can control electronic computing devices. Unlike conventional physical interfaces such as keyboards and mice, a touch screen display can provide a fully adaptable user interface. Furthermore, space which in the past may have to be dedicated to a physical keyboard can now form part of the screen and thus used to display additional content and utilised to display a user interface such as a keyboard only when required. As a result of the adaptability of touch screen displays and their efficient use of space, they are anticipated to form the basis of the majority of user interfaces on portable electronic devices in the near future. For example, tablet computing devices and smartphones almost exclusively use touch screen displays as the basis of their user interfaces.
As a result there has been an increase in user interface techniques which allow a user to provide a variety of commands using the touch screen. For example, multi-touch touch screen technologies allow for multiple simultaneous touches to be detected and interpreted. These can for example include pinching and zooming and swiping with multiple fingers.
As will be appreciated, ways in which a user may interact with a multiple touch screen with single hand can be limited by a difficulty in performing substantially different movements with the fingers of a single hand. Consequently, single hand interactions with touch screen devices are often limited.